l incarnate anachronisms, relics of dark ages
which had survived into an epoch of democracy and liberty, and it now
behooved them to readjust themselves to that. Their institutions must be
modernized, their Old World conceptions abandoned, and their people
taught to imitate the progressive nations of the West. What the
populations thought and felt on the subject was irrelevant, they being
less qualified to judge what was good for them than their
self-constituted guides and guardians. To the angry voices which their
spokesmen uplifted no heed need be paid, and passive resistance could be
overcome by coercion. This modified version of Carlyle's doctrine would
seem to be at the root of the Supreme Council's action toward the lesser
nations generally and in especial toward Rumania.

POLAND AND THE SUPREME COUNCIL

This frequent misdirection by the Supreme Council, however one may
explain it, created an electric state of the political atmosphere among
all nations whose interests were set down or treated as "limited," and
more than one of them, as we saw, contemplated striking out a policy of
passive resistance. As a matter of fact some of them timidly adopted it
more than once, almost always with success and invariably with impunity.
It was thus that the Czechoslovaks--the most docile of them
all--disregarding the injunctions of the Conference, took possession of
contentious territory,[178] and remained in possession of it for several
months, and that the Jugoslavs occupied a part of the district of
Klagenfurt and for a long time paid not the slightest heed to the order
issued by the Supreme Council to evacuate it in favor of the Austrians,
and that the Poles applied the same tactics to eastern Galicia. The
story of this last revolt is characteristic alike of the ignorance and
of the weakness of the Powers which had assumed the functions of
world-administrators. During the hostilities between the Ruthenians of
Galicia and the Poles the Council, taunted by the press with the
numerous wars that were being waged while the world's peace-makers were
chatting about cosmic politics in the twilight of the Paris conclave,
issued an imperative order that an armistice must be concluded at once.
But the Poles appealed to events, which swiftly settled the matter as
they anticipated. Neither the Supreme Council nor the agents it employed
had a real grasp of the east European situation, or of the role
deliberately assigned to Poland by